Subscribe to this blog

Follow by Email

Search This Blog

Nimble and Microsoft are Getting ever Closer

It has been three months since I last
talked with Jon Ferrara,CEOof Nimble. Back in
February, he introduced me to their Nimble Smart
Contacts add-in to Outlook Mobile. It delivered people and company social
relationship insights for free to over 40M Outlook Mobile users. Since then, he
and his Nimble team have been pretty busy working with Microsoft, as one could
see from his Facebook posts – having one coordination session in Seattle after
the other.

Nimble will soon announce that they
extended the Nimble freemium Smart Contacts for Outlook Mobile add-in to become
a free plugin into Outlook Desktop Windows/Mac and Office 365. This move
recognizes that the world is going cloud and mobile and that the Microsoft
stack of productivity applications is the most widely used set of applications
in Enterprises of all sizes. Google applications, with the notable exception of
Google Mail, do not stand a chance here. The same holds true for Salesforce,
which acquired the productivity tool startup Quip in August of
last year, or Zoho’s Docs, or any
other smaller vendor tools.

The logical next step
is to …

… integrate Nimble
into Outlook Desktop and Office 365. I already speculated about this in
my February post:

Imagine the following:
The Smart Contacts App, or rather Nimble becoming part of the Office365 fabric,
working with the full Microsoft application stack, like Outlook, Skype, Team,
Dynamics, Office365, LinkedIn, PowerBI and Azure. Add the fact that many
smaller businesses are still working without a CRM system, but merely use their
mail clients and spreedsheets – and MS Office. Continue the thought with:
Salesforce, SugarCRM, SAP, Dynamics are too expensive and too ‘clumsy’,
user-unfriendly. Add the idea of a deep integration into the Office
Graph/LinkedIn graph, and all of the sudden there is a powerful and affordable
social sales and marketing solution for Microsoft Office365 users.

Mind you, there still
would be gaps on the service, especially on the marketing side, but this is a
story for another day. For now I do see huge potential in this partnership.

And unsurprisingly,
this is exactly what Jon and his team did over the past three months. With this
new integration the Nimble Smart Contact Manager comes up within all Office 365
productivity and business applications, plus Outlook, Skype, Teams, and etc.,
giving users the rich contact information that Nimble gather in real time. This
is fully in line with Jon’s vision of Nimble “becoming the world’s individual
and teams’ simple, smart and social contact manager”.

My Take

This is Big, for both
parties!

The E-Mail inbox is
still the most widely used de facto contact manager. There are estimations that
more than 80 percent of companies worldwide do not use any contact manager or
CRM application at all.

With this step of
integrating deeper into the MS fabric, Nimble comes far closer to Jon’s vision
by getting access to a huge number of potential business users who need just a
bit more than just e-mail and for whom Dynamics365 and LinkedIn Sales Navigator
is too expensive and too clumsy, or just plainly not useful to people with
simple needs. By staying connected to Google, Nimble rides on the two most
prevalent e-mail platforms.

But what’s in it for
Microsoft, you ask?

Microsoft, as the
other Enterprise CRM vendors (Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, SugarCRM, etc.) face
increasing pressure by vendors that started off by addressing the SMB market,
especially the lower end of it. Salesforce itself concentrated first on smaller
companies or departmental solutions that brought them a foot in the door. With
this sales approach, based upon the subscription and cloud software models,
they disrupted the market – and moved on to become an enterprise player. SAP is
clawing its way down with different solutions that target smaller companies
than their usual clientele. Microsoft so far did the same upward move that
Salesforce did. The origins of Microsoft’s business applications (Axapta and
Navision) have been SMB-oriented. Now they are targeting Enterprises, of which
there are only so many. SugarCRM currently moves similarly.

In brief, these
vendors are vulnerable to aggressive SMB vendors like Zoho and others, which
can disrupt them from below.

Microsoft needs a
solution to address this vulnerability.

In comes Nimble to add
simple social sales and marketing to Office365. At a reasonable price point,
Nimble is likely to provide eighty to ninety percent of the functionality that
small company salespeople need to grow their business. And this in a very usable
way, automating a lot of the data gathering in the background. Not having to
collect this data and enter it manually into the contact database adds
immediate value. In comparison to learning to ride a bicycle, Nimble “will be
like the training wheels” to Dynamics365 and LinkedIn Sales Navigator says Jon,
“we will onboard millions of people to Microsoft Enterprise Apps and many will
not need more than that”.

In summary, Microsoft
gains the ability to attract a lot of smaller companies that might otherwise
consider another vendor’s CRM, to their platform. With the foot in the door,
Microsoft then has the possibility to easily upgrade these customers to
Dynamics365 business applications.

Let’s see what the
next steps are in this partnership. It has the potential to be very symbiotic.
It also has the potential of Nimble becoming Microsoft’s entry solution to CRM.

Comments

Post a Comment

Last Year's Top 5 Popular Posts

After having talked with Volker Hildebrand about the future of SAP
CRM and whether or not there will be a CRM component in S/4HANA at CRM
evolution 2017 I now had the chance to follow up with some folks back at SAP in
Walldorf. A little RecapVolker told me that, unsurprisingly, SAP is
working actively on adding CRM functionality into S/4HANA. In fact, they are merging
SAP CRM into it. This is in my eyes meanwhile also the preferred of the two
possible options; the other one would be marrying SAP Hybris C4C into S/4HANA.
This is the approach which
I originally preferred as it would lead to a cleaner code base. I changed
my mind, putting customer friendliness reasons over technological cleanliness.
The main advantages of merging SAP CRM into S4/HANA over SAP Hybris C4C are
that this approach a)Opens a future roadmap for
current SAP CRM customers that stretches beyond 2025. These customers else are
at risk of defecting. b)Provides the continued chance
for customers to run their SAP instance…

It has been a little more than half a year
now that I didn’t update on what is going on with SAP CRM and S/4HANA (which I
will refer to as S/4 from now on; SAP it is time for you to change the unwieldy
name to something more manageable). What Happened – So FarAs you are well aware SAP is working on
integrating a simplified version of SAP CRM into S4. The original roadmap
offered a first customer release of an integrated product in early 2018, based
on the September 2017 release of S4. The integration was planned as an add-on
to S4. The initial scope of this CRM add on for S/4 was supposed to cover what
is referred to as ‘core service’ functionality. This initial release shall be
followed by ‘core sales’ functionality later in 2018. 2019 then is supposed to
be dedicated to another round-off release covering further sales and service
functionality, including loyalty management and migration tools. Roadmap and statements also so far have
been fairly fuzzy about the strategic distinction b…